Tristan quietly entered from the adjoining dressing room. He wore a colorful silk banyan, the nightshirt he had donned their first night in Oban notably absent.
With a giggling laugh, she ran to him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I missed ye. I missed us.”
He pulled her tight against the muscled length of his body, and she breathed in the heady scent of cologne and warm male skin.
“You are the loveliest thing.” He pressed his face into her hair. “I feel utterly unworthy of you.”
“Nonsense.”
He pulled back, brown eyes open and sincere. “Are you sure of this, Wife? I will never—”
Isolde grinned, took his face in her hands, and kissed him hungrily in reply.
She expected him to be as eager as herself, hands grasping, desperate for more, more, more.
Instead, he quieted her kisses, refusing to be drawn into mindless passion.
He touched her with hallowed reverence, as if she were a treasure of infinite value. As if he were a pilgrim paying homage . . . overwhelmed and awestruck.
Each caress became a vow, a promise.
I honor you.
I treasure you.
I love you.
Isolde felt worshiped. Cherished. Beloved.
Light-filled and awestruck.
The incandescent beauty permeated her heart with such joy—
Emotion clogged her throat and stung her eyes.
The veneration in his hands and lips awakened feelings deeper than mere lust—connection, belonging, harmony.
The beginnings of a deep and abiding devotion. A chrysalis waiting to transform into the fluttering beauty of true love within her heart.
The promise that, with patience, love would eventually arrive.
Lying in his arms in the aftermath—her back to his chest—she wanted to express some of this to him.
But before a syllable could leave her mouth, Tristan tucked his face between her shoulder blades.
A shuddering sob wracked his body.
Tristan tried tocontrol his weeping. Truly he did.
What sort of pathetic idiotweptafter consummating his marriage?!
He blamed his emotional Italian mother.
It was just . . .
The whole had been so luminous, so transcendent. A wonderstruck hosanna of love and connection and tenderness . ..
He hadn’t known such purity could exist in the act of marriage. That the tawdry and traumatic encounter he had been forced to endure as a youth could become, in a different situation, something so nearly holy and sacred.
